Inaccuracies?

[deleted]

As I've noted elsewhere on this board, he makes a similar howler when he states that film noir (a movement he says started in 1941, but is generally regarded as beginning with 1940's Stranger on the Third Floor) was influenced by the Italian neo-realist movement, illustrating it with an extract from Rome: Open City (a film not seen in the US until 1946). He also states that Hollywood was only interested in making Betty Grable-style entertainments in the mid-40s - contradicting his own previous cmment about film noir - and that 'adventurous' American directors were going to Europe to make films (what, during the war?). Many of the more absurd moments in the show are down to his misunderstanding of what words actually mean - like his bizarre confusion of the word classic and classical to support his belief that Casablanca is too formally unbalanced to be a classic - but at times his series warps not just the English language or history but time itself to try to make some of his more bizarre notions stick.


"Security - release the badgers."

This mistake is not essential, except to some one like me who has written books about where Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd filmed their great comedies.

Los Angeles used to have many tunnels - several were removed 60+ years ago when the hills were graded flat, but during episode 2 he says Buster Keaton filmed a stunt from Three Ages overlooking the Third Street Tunnel. It was filmed instead near the Bradbury Mansion overlooking the Hill Street Tunnel. The Third Street Tunnel is still around, so maybe he just assumed it had to be the spot, as the other tunnels are long gone. You can read about using the Hill Street Tunnel to film stunts in this blog post of mine.

http://silentlocations.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/the-artist-locations-p art-4-bradbury-chaplin-and-lloyd/

Granted I only watched the first two episodes, but one inaccuracy I caught was he showed a scene from The Empire Strikes Back. It lists the director as George Lucas. Seemed like poor research to me on the filmmaker's part. Maybe I should watch the rest, but I probably won't.

One obvious inaccuracy occurred when he was discussing Gone with the Wind's camera pullback on Scarlett O'Hara and her father looking at Tara, and he refers to them as "lovers".

"It's too late... too late. There's no bringing her back.

An unquestionable error is that the narration states that, only when Charles Bronson looks into the eyes of Henry Fonda at the end of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST does Bronson's character realize that Fonda's character had been the one who killed his brother, when, in fact, Bronson knew Fonda was the killer all along. The entire film, in fact, was built around this point.

---
"The Dig"
http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/

Besides saying Scarlett and her father were lovers, which is like saying Charles Foster Kane put a lot of money into his daughter's opera career and calling yourself a film scholar -- even if you're like Leslie Howard and say, "Heaven help me if I read the book," you have to pay some attention to Gone With the Wind -- he also says the youngest daughter of the aging couple in Ozu's "Tokyo Story" is the most attentive, but she's their daughter-in-law. That's the point -- their biological children don't want to have anything to do with them, but a relative stranger shows them as much hospitality as she can, given she's living in poverty (husband, old couple's son, died in WWII).


Sh-it's a secret!

OK, here's another one: he says Cary Grant's character in "Bringing Up Baby" "is trying to buy a bone."

??

David, Cary Grant's character, works for a museum who sent an expedition to Utah, who are mailing David the last bone he needs for his brontosaurus skeleton.



Sh-it's a secret!